From March to May 2024, I had the opportunity to serve as the inaugural Gallery and Exhibitions Visiting Fellow at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center (ASHK), a non-profit organization that promotes engagement with Asia’s arts, culture, education, business and policy. As a scholar of contemporary Chinese art, this was an amazing opportunity to immerse myself in the Hong Kong art scene and learn more about the daily operations of an arts nonprofit.
In my role, I helped with final preparations of the exhibition Wifredo Lam: Homecoming, which introduced a survey of the modernist artist Wifredo Lam, whose father was Chinese, and opened just a couple weeks after I arrived. I worked alongside Assistant Curator Hain Yoon and guest curator Eskil Lam to oversee the installation of the exhibition, which included paintings, drawings and biographical ephemera, and also helped edit the accompanying exhibition catalog. I continued to support the gallery and exhibitions department with its subsequent exhibition, Never End: The Art and Life of Gaylord Chan, which was the first retrospective of the Hong Kong artist after his passing in 2020. I wasn’t able to see the finished exhibition as it opened after my fellowship ended, but I learned about exhibition management as we coordinated with guest curator Joyce Hei-ting Wong on art lending, programming, tours and the exhibition catalog.
March was a particularly exciting time to start, as it aligned with city-wide preparations for the international art fair Art Basel, as well as the locally organized fair Art Central, which both occurred over the same weekend. I was able to attend both fairs over multiple days, gaining exposure to new-to-me artists and witnessing art market trends. Most of the city’s galleries and museums organized new exhibitions to correspond with the influx of international art world visitors, which provided further opportunity to explore the city and see even more art. Also overlapping that weekend was the Hong Kong International Film Festival. It was illuminating to attend various screenings of films both new and old over the course of its two weeks.
I tried to take full advantage of my three months in Hong Kong. I was able to travel to both Taipei, Taiwan and Guangzhou, China, cities I hadn’t previously visited, to complete dissertation
research and visit important art collections and/or sites. While in Taipei, I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab and the National Palace Museum. In Guangzhou, I conducted research at Video Bureau, an archive of Chinese video art, and visited the Times Museum, Vitamin Creative Space’s Mirrored Gardens complex and the He Art Museum. In Hong Kong I visited as many art spaces and exhibitions as I could, and also performed research at the M+ Research Centre and the Asia Art Archive, which both hold archival collections of modern and contemporary East Asian art. I also made sure to build in time for more typical tourist activities, such as hiking parts of the Hong Kong Trail, exploring local restaurants and visiting Cheung Chau island.
The president of ASHK, Alice Mong (an Ohio State alum) was a generous host who helped me network and connect with other Buckeyes who live in Hong Kong. It was great to feel that connection to home even while I was abroad.
Allie Mickle
PhD Candidate
